21
" But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible. And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. (" In Old Russia" ) "
23
" A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. They'll go by, like you could, arm-in-arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will foot little harlots. Many are clowns, but many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices, whims and amiabilities, the naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound, and the puerile. A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety. The ultra-respectable! But the condemned, anyway. "
― Charles Fort , The Book of the Damned
25
" In my experiences, the common critic of Christianity, when he thinks of Christianity, imagines a sort of elementary, Sunday School blunder of elements: fiery Hell, an angry God, 'try not to sin', 'be good so that you can go to Heaven', absurd miracles, hyper-fundamentalist tales, religious hypocrites, and Jesus telling people not to judge. There is no horse more dead than such. I maintain that understanding Christianity and the Bible is quite like painting a piece of art. Let a toddler paint a puppy; then let an adult who is a long-time painter paint the very same puppy. They are both paintings of the puppy, but one is far more detailed, rational, realistic, and believable than the other. One is distorted and comical; the other is proportional and lively. One can write off Theology if he so pleases, but he might not be very wise in using the toddler's painting when it comes time to identify the real puppy or when trying to confront actual men of the Faith. "
― Criss Jami , Healology
28
" During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to death. The children stumble upon an edible house inhabited by a witch, who imprisons Hansel and fattens him up in preparation for eating him. Fortunately Gretel shoves the witch into a fiery oven, and “the godless witch burned to death in a horrible way.” 41 • Cinderella’s stepsisters, when trying to squeeze into her slippers, take their mother’s advice and cut off a toe or heel to make them fit. Doves notice the blood, and after Cinderella marries the prince, they peck out the stepsisters’ eyes, punishing them “for their wickedness and malice with blindness for the rest of their lives.”
Snow White arouses the jealousy of her stepmother, the queen, so the queen orders a hunter to take her into the forest, kill her, and bring back her lungs and liver for the queen to eat. When the queen realizes that Snow White has escaped, she makes three more attempts on her life, two by poison, one by asphyxiation. After the prince has revived her, the queen crashes their wedding, but “iron slippers had already been heated up for her over a fire of coals.... She had to put on the red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead. "
― Steven Pinker , The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
32
" ...never [enter] into dispute or argument with another. I never saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many, on their getting warm, becoming rude, & shooting one another. ... When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, he has a right to his opinion, as I to mine; why should I question it? His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion? ... There are two classes of disputants most frequently to be met with among us. The first is of young students, just entered the threshold of science, with a first view of its outlines, not yet filled up with the details & modifications which a further progress would bring to their knoledge. The other consists of the ill-tempered & rude men in society, who have taken up a passion for politics. ... Consider yourself, when with them, as among the patients of Bedlam, needing medical more than moral counsel. Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially on politics. In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal. "
― Thomas Jefferson
33
" Anyone who has lived here for long enough has seen it all before: opposing sides of the political spectrum ferociously criticising each other, getting hot under the collar about this and that, bringing up all sorts of allegations and innuendos. Then just as it looks as if the argument is about to get physical, harmony breaks out. A dialogue is opened, an accord or a compromise is found. And suddenly, just as quickly as it came, all that fiery rhetoric subsides and everyone realizes it was all synthetic, put on for show when all along some deal was imminent anyway. It's as if every politician is merely an actor in a little theatre, and as soon as the curtain falls and the public can't see them any more they all slap each other on the back, tot up the takings and go out for an expensive meal. "
― Tobias Jones , White Death
34
" He was savoring for the first time the ineffable subtleties of feminine refinement. Never had he encountered this grace of language, this quiet taste in dress, these relaxed, dove like postures. He marveled at the sublimity of her soul and at the lace on her petticoat. With her ever-changing moods, by turns brooding and gay, chattering and silent, fiery and casual, she aroused in him a thousand desires, awakening instincts or memories. She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague " she" of all the poetry books. "
40
" I sit down by the river.
Its incessant flow has polished the rocks carried from the top of the mountain. The aqueous caress, that has unrolled for millions of years the liquid ribbon from the summits towards the plains, keeps the freshness of the youth.
The July sun heats the trees on the shore, while the stream of water refreshes the air; Two breaths which mingle without opposing one another. The foliage softly sways under the summer breeze, tuning its movement to that of the fiery wave.
Won by a palpable peace, thank you Mother Nature, I dive into my book.
A time later, which seems infinite to me, the sky becomes darker, I raise my head.
How many hours have passed during which, indifferent to the human time, the cascading water has descended from the mountain? How much water has passed in front of me? How many beings have quenched their thirst there, and get their lives out from it?
How long after my small passage on Earth will have been forgotten, the river will continue to flow, to carry its rocks, to erode the mountain until it becomes a plain, to spread life like a vein of the Earth ? "
― Gabrielle Dubois